Congress Looks Into Obstruction As Calls for Justice Inquiry Rise

By ERIC LICHTBLAU

Published: December 8, 2007

The Central Intelligence Agency faced the threat of obstruction-of-justice investigations on Friday from both the Justice Department and Congressional committees over the destruction of videotapes of interrogations of Qaeda operatives.

The Justice Department said it would review calls for a formal inquiry into the destruction of the tapes, while the House and Senate intelligence committees said they were opening investigations of their own into the episode, which Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate panel, called ''extremely disturbing.''

Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, said Friday that President Bush ''has no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction'' before this week. She added that the C.I.A. and the White House counsel's office were reviewing the facts and that they would cooperate with any Justice Department inquiry.

The pressure for a full investigation into the handling of the tapes puts Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey in a difficult position early in his tenure because of the questions that arose at his confirmation hearings in October about his views on harsh C.I.A. interrogation tactics.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other liberal groups on Friday called for the appointment of an outside counsel to examine possible criminal acts by the C.I.A., arguing that the Justice Department had proved unable in the past to adequately investigate claims of prisoner abuse against the administration.

The tapes, which showed severe interrogation methods against two operatives from Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, were made in 2002 and destroyed in 2005, the C.I.A. acknowledged this week after being questioned about the issue by The New York Times. The agency said the tapes were destroyed in part to protect the identities of the interrogators.

Meanwhile, the former chairmen of the Sept. 11 commission, who said the C.I.A. assured them repeatedly during their inquiry that no original material existed from its interrogations of Qaeda figures, said they were furious to learn about the tapes.

The C.I.A. indicated that the Sept. 11 commission never specifically asked for any tape recordings of prisoner interrogations.

But in separate interviews on Friday, the co-chairmen, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, said they had made clear in hours of negotiations and discussions with the C.I.A., as well as in written requests, that they wanted all material connected to the interrogations of Qaeda operatives in the agency's custody in order to get a complete understanding of the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks for their 2004 report.

The commission ended up getting summaries of interrogation reports and was able to forward questions of its own for C.I.A. officers to ask the prisoners.

''The C.I.A. certainly knew of our interest in getting all the information we could on the detainees, and they never indicated to us there were any videotapes,'' Mr. Hamilton said. ''Did they obstruct our inquiry? The answer is clearly yes. Whether that amounts to a crime, others will have to judge.''

Mr. Kean said, ''I'm upset that they didn't tell us the truth.''

The existence of material on unidentified Qaeda detainees also became a central issue in the terrorism prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, who sought access to witness statements in an effort to show that he did not have advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Justice Department, under questioning from the federal judge in the case in 2005, denied that any tape recording of the interrogations existed, only to concede last month that the C.I.A. had found three tapes that are apparently still in existence. It is unclear which Qaeda figures are on those tapes.

Edward B. MacMahon Jr., who represented Mr. Moussaoui during his trial in 2006, said in an interview on Friday that based on the C.I.A.'s acknowledgment that tapes of two Qaeda prisoners were destroyed, ''It's obvious to me that they destroyed material evidence in the case.''

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the C.I.A., said in a statement on Thursday that the tape of Mr. Zubaydah's interrogation was not relevant to the Moussaoui trial. But Mr. MacMahon said, ''General Hayden isn't a federal judge, and that's not his decision to make.''

Ms. Perino said President Bush ''has complete confidence'' in General Hayden and his handling of the issue.

With calls from House and Senate Democrats for a full investigation, the White House seemed to be bracing for an investigation from the Justice Department by initiating an inquiry of its own through the White House counsel's office. The aim, Ms. Perino said, is to ''gather facts.''

The Justice Department said that it was reviewing the requests from Congress for a full investigation. A senior Justice Department official, who spoke about internal deliberations on condition of anonymity, suggested that the department would be likely to wait for a referral from the C.I.A. inspector general.

Key questions in Justice Department or Congressional inquiries are likely to focus on the C.I.A.'s policies on the destruction of classified material; the legal rationale for destroying the tapes; the status of requests pending at the time of the destruction from Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers, the Sept. 11 commission and other proceedings; and what members of Congress were told about the tapes.

With Democrats seizing on the destruction of the tapes, some leading Republicans appeared to distance themselves from the political fallout. Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the intelligence committee, sent a letter to the C.I.A., along with Representative Silvestre Reyes of Texas, chairman of the panel, saying the agency's suggestion that the committee was told of the tapes' destruction ''simply is not true.''